Back in the old days, if the Indians had to make a trip across the
lake, they'd take a live animal with them to appease the monster. Why
not just go around the lake? Easier said than done -- Okanagan Lake is
84 miles long. As more white settlers arrived, more sightings were
reported -- at one point in 1926, near Okanagan Mission Beach, about 30
cars full of people reported seeing the monster.

The Ogopogo name came about because a traveling performer played an
English music hall song called "The Ogo-Pogo: The Funny Fox-Trot" by
Cumberland Clark and Mark Strong. The creature described in the
song has almost no traits in common with the lake monster -- the closest
you can get is "His mother was an earwig, his father was a whale,
I'm going to put a little bit of salt on his tail." The rest of the song
describes him as a googly-eyed man from Hindustan who wears
boots and plays a banjo. But for whatever reason, the name Ogopogo was
adopted for the monster, and Naitaka was only rarely heard again.

I'm not big on believing this stuff -- and what I've read about the
sightings doesn't make it any easier for me to do so. Most of them sound
like folks who mistook common objects like floating logs for a creature
in the lake, pranksters, out-and-out liars, and people who saw a
monster because they wanted to see a monster. Like, frankly, almost
every cryptid out there. I was really big on Ogopogo when I was a kid
-- I'd read the book listed in my sources below when I was in elementary
school, and for some reason, I adored Ogopogo on a level that I never
did for Nessie -- but there's just no credible evidence for any kind of
sea monster or sea serpent, especially not one that lives in an
inland, freshwaterlake.